Module 3

Your first plugin: commercial-legal

What it does

Contract review is the most universal legal chore there is, which makes commercial-legal the natural first tour stop. In its own words, it “reviews vendor agreements, NDAs, and SaaS subscriptions against your sales-side or purchasing-side playbook, tracks renewals and cancel-by deadlines before they're missed, routes escalations to the right approver, and translates reviews into summaries business stakeholders will actually read.”

The key word is playbook. The plugin doesn't review against some generic notion of a “good contract” — it reviews against your positions, the ones the cold-start interview wrote into your practice profile: what liability cap you accept, what you never accept, who can approve what, even “the one thing” that's always a deal-breaker for you. Same plugin, different lawyer, different review.

Source: plugin.json · practice-profile template

Under the hood

You met the parts in Module 2; here's how this plugin arranges them. The full inventory is in the commercial-legal fact sheet — the shape is what matters:

One front door, three specialists behind it

You'll mostly call one skill: /commercial-legal:review. It reads your document's titles — the main agreement and every exhibit — to figure out what it's looking at (the skill is explicit that body keywords aren't enough: “a 40-page MSA with ‘confidential’ throughout is not an NDA”). Then it routes to the right specialist skill behind the door:

  • vendor-agreement-review — MSAs and services agreements,
  • nda-review — the GREEN / YELLOW / RED NDA triage from Module 2,
  • saas-msa-review — a subscription overlay (auto-renewal mechanics, price escalation, data portability, SLAs).

Before it commits, it checks with you: “I'm going to review this as: [type]. Sound right?” — you can correct it in plain English. That confirmation is a setting (confirm_routing), on by default, that you can turn off as trust builds.
Source: skills/review/SKILL.md

And a quiet maintenance crew

The three background subagents form a loop anyone who's tried to keep a playbook current will recognize: deal-debrief (weekly) asks you to log context on deals that deviated from the playbook; playbook-monitor watches that log, and when the same clause has been deviated from about five times in a year, proposes a playbook update; you accept or reject it via the review-proposals skill. Meanwhile renewal-watcher (weekly) reads the renewal register and warns before cancel-by windows close. The playbook stays a living document — but every change to it goes through you.
Source: agents/

Guided — review the Wickline contract

Guided · one full review, start to finish

You'll need the plugin installed (Module 1). No setup handy? Read along — the exhibit below shows what you'd see.

1. Get the contract (same one as Module 1 — Wickline's vendor paper, salted with landmines):

⬇ Sablefield ⟷ Wickline vendor agreement (Word) or plain text (.md)

2. Give Sablefield a real playbook — a review is only as sharp as the positions behind it, and Module 1's quick setup wrote only sensible defaults. The cleanest way to fill in real positions without re-running the whole interview is the profile editor, /commercial-legal:customize. Run it, then give it Sablefield's purchasing-side positions — it shows what's there, takes your positions, and confirms each:

/commercial-legal:customize

When it asks what you'd like to change, hand it Sablefield's purchasing-side positions — written so the Wickline contract will trip them (give the whole list, or go one at a time):

Set my purchasing-side playbook:

- Liability cap — vendor capped at 12 months' fees paid or payable, with
  carve-outs above the cap for confidentiality breach, data breach, and IP
  indemnity. Cap base must be "fees paid in the 12 months preceding the claim."
  Never accept a 3-month cap base, or a cap that applies "without exception."
- Indemnity — vendor indemnifies IP infringement AND data-breach / privacy
  claims. Never accept an indemnity that excludes data incidents.
- Data protection — vendor signs our DPA before any service touches
  customer-site data. Never accept the vendor training its models on our data,
  even "de-identified."
- Term — auto-renewal only with a cancel window of 30 days or less, plus
  termination for convenience on 30 days' notice. Never accept a 90-day notice
  window with no termination for convenience.
- Governing law — Delaware, New York, or California are fine; escalate
  jury-trial waivers.
- The one thing — nobody trains on imagery from our customers' facilities.

/commercial-legal:customize is also how you change any single position later — tell it what to change and it rewrites just that, flagging anything that would contradict the rest of your profile.
Source: commercial-legal · customize/SKILL.md

3. Now run the review skill on the contract. Send the command on its own (details on the same line stop it from firing):

/commercial-legal:review

When it picks up, attach the contract and tell it what you want — e.g. “We're Sablefield, the customer (purchasing side). Flag every deviation, and don't change anything.”

Or skip the slash and just ask, in one message (works in either app):

Use the commercial-legal plugin to review this attached agreement — we're Sablefield, the customer; flag every deviation, don't change anything.

Be as casual or as precise as you like. (One Cowork caveat: a playbook saved in step 2 may not persist there — Module 1's note — so it would review on standard positions; name your sharpest positions in the request if so.)

4. Watch for two moments. First the routing check: it should identify a services agreement with subscription features and propose vendor-agreement-review + the saas-msa-review overlay — and ask “Sound right?” Say yes (or correct it). Then comes the memo. Here's what it looks like on our contract, shortened for the page:

Exhibit — what the review memo looks like (abridged illustration)

PRIVILEGED & CONFIDENTIAL — ATTORNEY WORK PRODUCT — PREPARED AT THE DIRECTION OF COUNSEL

⚠️ Reviewer note
— Sources: research connector not connected — cites from training knowledge, verify before relying
— Read: all 11 sections (Exhibit A noted as omitted)
— Flagged for your judgment: 6 items marked [review] inline
— Before relying: confirm your cap and data-use positions — two findings sit on typical Never lists

Routing: “Software Services Agreement” → vendor-agreement-review + saas-msa-review overlay.

§FindingLegal riskBusiness friction
8Cap = fees paid in prior 3 months, and §8.3 applies it “without exception” — even to confidentiality breaches and data incidents. No carve-outs. [review]🔴🟠
4.4 / 5.1Perpetual license to use Customer Vision Data to train vendor models — and the vendor owns whatever it trains. [review]🔴🟠
3.2 / 3.4Auto-renewal with a 90-day non-renewal window; no termination for convenience. → offer: add to renewal register🟠🔴
4.2No DPA included, despite the service processing customer-site imagery. [review]🟠🟡
9.3Indemnity expressly excludes data breach and privacy violations.🟠🟡

One question I'd ask that isn't in my checklist: §4.4 permits training on “aggregated or de-identified” data — de-identified by whose standard, and is camera footage of your customers' facilities realistically de-identifiable? [review]

What next? Pick one and I'll help you build it out:
1. Draft the redline — cap, carve-outs, data-use, and renewal-window language for your review.
2. Escalate — a short note to your approver with the two Never-list findings.
3. Get more facts — three questions for the Wickline account team.
4. Watch and wait — add the renewal window to the register and revisit.

Condensed for the page; a real run produces a fuller memo (and its exact findings will vary with your playbook — that's the point). The format follows the plugin's own output rules: commercial-legal/CLAUDE.md.

5. Two things to notice while it runs. The findings carry two ratings, not one — legal risk (can we get sued?) and business friction (does this cost us time, money, or goodwill?) — because the 90-day renewal trap is mild law but expensive business. And the memo ends with options, not a decision. The decision is yours; it just builds out whichever path you pick.

6. Compare against the answer key: this contract has at least six planted landmines (the table above shows five — §11.1's one-way assignment clause is the quiet sixth). How many did your run catch? Anything it caught that we didn't plant?

Stretch — three harder pushes

Stretch · push on it

Each of these exercises a different skill in the plugin.

Stretch 1 — NDA triage. Here's a second synthetic document: a mutual NDA from Tellermark Health for a robot pilot — friendlier-looking paper hiding a one-sided 24-month non-solicit, a one-way “residuals” clause (their people may reuse whatever they remember of your secrets — not vice versa), perpetual confidentiality for everything, and no compelled-disclosure carve-out.

⬇ Tellermark ⟷ Sablefield mutual NDA (Word) or plain text (.md)

/commercial-legal:review

Then attach the NDA and ask: “Triage this mutual NDA — we're Sablefield. Is it GREEN, YELLOW, or RED, and what specifically drives the rating?”

Stretch 2 — translate for the business. After either review, ask for the version a non-lawyer reads — then judge it: would your head of procurement actually understand the two-minute answer?

/commercial-legal:stakeholder-summary

Then: “Write the two-minute version of this review for Sablefield's VP of Operations — can she sign, what changes are we asking for, and what happens if we just sign as-is?”

Stretch 3 — the deadline trap. The Wickline contract auto-renews with a 90-day window. Put that to the register and see what the plugin does with dates:

/commercial-legal:renewal-tracker

Then: “Add the Wickline agreement — 12-month term from March 3, 2026, auto-renews, 90-day non-renewal notice. When's the real cancel-by date, and when should I be warned?”

Check its math yourself: 90 days before March 3, 2027 — what date is that, and did it say the same?

Free play

Free play · break it on purpose

Some directions people enjoy — none of this is an assignment:

  • Edit the contract. Fix §8 yourself (12-month cap, carve-outs for confidentiality and data breach), re-run the review, and see if the 🔴 goes away. Or make it worse and see if it escalates.
  • Flip sides. Tell it you're Wickline (sales side) and re-review the same paper. Watch the findings invert — what was a landmine becomes your standard position.
  • Argue with it. “I think a 3-month cap is fine for a $30k/yr tool — push back on me.” Does it hold its ground, defer, or reason about proportionality?
  • Probe the edges. Hand it something that isn't a contract at all (a meeting agenda) and see how the router copes. Or ask it to review against a playbook position you never configured and watch what it admits to not knowing.

Check your understanding

Lab notebook

Governance note — a header is a label, not a control

This plugin stamps its memos PRIVILEGED & CONFIDENTIAL — ATTORNEY WORK PRODUCT — and then its own instructions immediately caution that the stamp is “a label, not a control”: send the memo to a company-wide channel or a counterparty and the protection is gone, header or no header. (It even warns that “work product” is a US doctrine that mostly doesn't exist abroad, and switches to a RESEARCH NOTES — NOT LEGAL ADVICE header when a non-lawyer is driving.) The plugin will ask before helping you send a privileged document somewhere that waives it — but the privilege call, like every other decision in the memo, is yours.

And as always: the review, the triage, the summary, the register — every one of them is a draft for attorney review. Faster first passes, never an unreviewed final answer.
Source: commercial-legal/CLAUDE.md (Outputs + Destination check)

Going deeper: the commercial-legal fact sheet has the full skill/agent/connector inventory with file-level citations.